In a few weeks, professors might be getting ready to cover the media in their various government classes. If you’re one of them, here’s a link that you might want to consider. Gathered from the Library of Congress, the Journalism’s Voyage West data visualization “plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States.” The graph works quite simply, just take the arrow which starts in the year 1690 and move it steadily to the right. You can also click on particular cities to find out which publications were present at that time.

Students will see that in 1690, the country had one newspapers in Boston. Move the arrow again to 1774, and the United States has a grand total of 61 listings. More so, by the turn of the 20th century, there were 15,872 listings in an era dubbed “Yellow Journalism,” and newspapers had begun to expand past the east coast. And finally in 2011, we see that, in fact, newspapers are beginning to decline as there are only 13,670 newspaper listings.

Bottom line, students can track the growth and decline of a major news outlet and form their own discussions and conclusions.

Thanks to Mary Jane Lindrum, our CFO, for this find.